Here’s a 700-page nugget from the stacks, for those American Culture folks:

John Harvey Kellogg, of breakfast cereal fame, published this Ladies’ Guide in Health and Disease: Girlhood, Maidenhood, Wifehood, Motherhood in 1896.  Kellogg was “famed for promoting vegetarianism, sexual abstinence, and the liberal use of enemas,” and “here offers a straightforward and in some ways highly progressive (for its era) discussion of women’s health at all stages of life, focusing on developing a ‘higher type of womanhood’ (iii), one free from unnecessary invalidism and susceptibility to disease.  Kellogg denounces corseting, unsurprisingly, and also condemns the extreme differences in treatment of little boys and girls, which resulted in the latter becoming both mentally and physically but poor shadows of the vibrant women they might have been.  Although staunchly opposed to birth control and abortion, he also insists on married women’s freedom from unwanted ‘marital excesses’: of all the rights to which a woman is entitled, that of the custody of her own body is the most indubitable (p. 341)” [PRB&M description].

Tags: Browsing the Stacks